Why Analytics & Tracking with Bit.ly Rocks? When the majority of Twitters need to shorten a URL most look to tinyURL, this is a bad decision for the simple fact that tinyURL doesn’t provide any type of  visitor or usage statistics, you can also forget about getting any sort of decent statistics with tinyURL from Google Analytics. Enter Bit.ly this intelligent URL shortening service not only shortens your URLs but also provides valuable visitor and traffic referral statistics.

Bit.ly URL Shortening Home page

Bit.ly tracks the following statistics:

Number of Clicks, that’s right find the total number of clicks your Bit.ly URL has generated at present, over the past day, week, month and as a total.

 Bit.ly Click Statistics

Twitter Conversions, Want to know which twitter conversions have mentioned your URL? Bit.ly takes care of this for you. I find this great for gauging how well a URL and Tweet has been received by the Twitter community, which allows you to engage in the conversation, Now this is valuable!

Referrers It’s a fact that even though your shortened URL was originally posted to twitter, it will most certainly be accessed, referred to and posted in sources outside of Twitter. In many cases I find my URLs posted to twitter get more hits from sources outside of twitter, referred in most cases by email and websites.

 Bit.ly Referrers Statistics

Locations Bit.ly statistics will also tell you how many visitors clicked on your shortened URL per country. This is great information to know allowing you to better target your future tweets and articles, at your target audience.

 Bit.ly Locations/Country Statistics

There is one sticking point which you may not appreciate Bit.ly stats generated for your Bit.ly URLs aren’t private, meaning anyone can view the statistics for a Bit.ly URL simply by adding a + to the end of a bit.ly URL. For instance the Bit.ly URL for this article is http://bit.ly/X96PY so by typing http://bit.ly/X96PY+ or http://bit.ly/info/X96PY into a browser you can see the Bit.ly statistics for the shortened URL of this article. Personally I don’t see this as a show stopper.

If you are looking at using Bit.ly on a regular basis you should sign up and add their Browser Bookmarklet and Sidebar to your browser so you can easily use and keep track of all of your shortened URLs. Bit.ly is also a Shorten URL option TweetDeck.  What are you waiting for? Ditch TinyUrl and other URL shortening services and start using Bit.ly, its analytics will give you the full picture of who what where and how your Tweets are being consumed allowing you to improve and better target your future Tweets.